1. ENGLISH PEDAGOGY
STUDENT TEACHING PRACTICE
OBSERVATION STAGE
Task 1: The School and Learning Environment
Name of Student: Rafael Martin Alejandro Munoz Toledo
Name of School: Colegio Particular “San Vicente”
Number of Students
Date: Monday 25th, 2012 Class: 8vo Basico-1ero Medio
Briefly describe the following aspects:
1. The school
Describe the general background of the school including the physical location,
organisation, student population, and philosophy, educational and behavioural policies.
“Colegio San Vicente” is located at Sierra 68, Playa Ancha, Valparaiso, Chile. Founded in 1982,
it belongs to the SA “Casa Grande”, a private organization composed by a group of teachers
coming from different field of studies.
According to its PEI ( Pedagogical project ), “Colegio San Vicente” is an educational institution
including shared grant, providing nursery , elementary and secondary education which is on the
basis of scientific- humanist principles. Although it was born as a private school, where
preschool and basic education was paid, it was until June, 1985 where it is recognized as a
subsidized pre, primary and secondary school by the regional secretary of Education.
Its philosophy relies on the base of a “cantered- person education” with a humanistic approach
where learning to live together, to communicate, and to value diversity are essential along the
entire teaching process. Also, qualities like autonomy, learning, and creativity are promoted
among the students during this process, along with the notion that “the love of human beings and

2. respect for the environment” are the axis of its philosophy. The student of “Colegio San Vicente”
must be a person aware of this matter, as well as his/her social role, embedded in a society which
is actively and constantly changing.
According to its internal behavioural policies published this current 2012, “Colegio San Vicente”
is characterized by maintain a healthy living environment that promotes human development of
their students. Thus, it is understood that a positive coexistence is based on the solid foundation
that constitute the practising of discipline and responsibility. Responsibility at this point is
conceived as the conscious and rational acceptance of the rules to regulate relationship that
promote affective work and school life, among students, colleagues, authorities and the rest of
the school’s community.
2. The school
Describe the atmosphere of the school and the levels of the engagement in the room.
Makes notes on sitting, sight lines, space, air, equipment, etc.
The level of engagement was quiet good, students shown strong willingness to follow instruction
and interact in most of the activities proposed by the teacher. The classroom where spacious
enough, on them two double and one single row were distributed in order to contain from 30 to
33 students per grade. Each lesson was of 45 minutes and the equipment inside classrooms i.e.
speakers, laptops, data show, televisions was poor.
However, the environment at school was quite good. Few serious discipline issues, activities out
of classrooms i.e. workshops, celebrations, Olympics and festivals promote integration and
participation among students as well as reinforcing the identity students have as a members of
this community.

3. 3. The activities and resources
a) Makes notes on the kind of activities used, the nature of students involvement,
balance of students doing things and teacher doing things.
Basically during the lessons I have observed, either at 8vo Basico and 1ero Medio, students
have to work on activities such as presentations, readings comprehensions and worksheets.
Presentations consist of two sessions researching about English speaking countries where
students have to write down a report and device a power presentation covering different topics
such as history, important places, population, music, food, costumes etc. Teacher provided
individual assistance and once the reports were already done, they had three lessons to share their
work with the rest of the class. At the moment of presenting, teacher previously assigned three
different questions to three students who have to formulate them. This methodology was the
same for each and every presentation.
Reading activities consist of a translation from some news originally written in Chilean
Spanish to English. After choosing one from any media resource i.e. newspaper, website, blog
etc, students had to translate and read them individually in front of the class. As well as the
previous activity, teacher assigned three students to formulate questions related to the news’
contents e.g. Why did you choose that news? What do you think about it? Etc.
Finally, the third kind of activity where on the basis of worksheets work, teacher provides the
grammar instruction on the board and then students have to complete different study guides
related to topics like -WH question words, past simple forms, present continuous etc.
On average teacher involvement was intended to give instructions and clarify some doubts,
meanwhile students have to work most of the time individually, in duos or in groups.

4. b) Describe the resources and material available within the school. How are the
resources used in the classroom?
Unfortunately, resources and materials inside the classroom were almost poor. Classrooms
where no equipped at all i.e. no data show, no speakers, no laptops. The tools available had to be
carry on from the library to the classroom and set them up each and every time teachers wanted
to use them. However, an almost full equipped computer laboratory helped to mitigate this
extremely weak point, but needless is to say that this school was a bit out of date in
implementing technology for educational purposes, something which directly affected the ESL
lessons, especially as regard of the importance that audio – visual materials have on it.
Task 2: Student’s learning
In this second observation task, you should focus on the things that help to create
conditions for effective learning and on the aspects that play a part in preventing learning.
1. The learners
How motivated are the learners? Why? To what extent are they taking part in their own
learning? To what extent are they expecting the teacher to do the work for them?
Learners are motivated as much as the activities and themes covered on a lesson have
some significance to them, it is almost a principle that the practitioner have adopted after
10 weeks of observation, assistantship and teaching time.
Now, if students take part on their learning is something that only occurred inside the
classroom, paradoxically, Colegio San Vicente has the policy of not assigning any sort of
homework or assignment to students, so it is assumed that learning is something which
students have to work on formally at school, during instruction time. However, the
counterpart of it is that most of the time students are expected to develop their work by
their own. Teacher indeed are not expected to work for them, but to assist them in order
to let them build their own learning.

5. 2. Behaviour during classroom activities
Describe the way students are encouraged to participate in activities. Are there any
particular strategies for managing issues and motivate students? Are there any
students with special needs?
No particular strategies were detected inside the classroom, but outside the classroom
certain number of activities in which students had to participate gave them a sort of
reward in order to improve their grades or in order to gain a word of congratulation.
Olympics is a good example of it, on them students had to face a contest where questions
about different subject of studies had to be answer i.e. Mathematics, Biology, Music,
Philosophy etc. Most of the participation was in groups. Each and every grade was
divided in three groups, each group competed against other grade’s groups, for instance,
group 1 from 8th grade, compete against group 2 and 3 from 7th grade. Each group had a
moderator who picked up a question randomly. Then moderator went to discuss the best
answer along with the rest of the group, then provided the answer to a jury who qualified
them as a good or wrong answer. Olympics took place the first and last Thursday of May
2012.
Other activities that where highly demanded and seems to very successfully as well were
the so called “ACLE” workshops, these workshops were not mandatory in attendance and
covered themes such as Painting , Dancing, handcrafting, English Language etc.
Finally, it must be said that no students with serious special needs were detected at least
in elder students, however in most elementary levels a team of specialist teachers
monitoring the learning process in children and pre elementary students all the time.

6. 3. Discuss the learning style and levels of English in the classroom.
As regard as how young students were, it is clear that activities that were meaningful to them
seem to be very engaging and successful. Students learning styles go from kinetic, visual,
auditory learners, in fact activities like songs (audio and video songs), on line games and reading
comprehension demonstrated to be very successful among students.
The level of English goes from strong abilities in reading and writing skills (especially on
grammar) but weak abilities in speaking skills. However most students were very conscious of
how important is to know and to speak a second language such as English, few of them were
able to formulate sentence and expressions in English, but generally speaking, students shown
very willing to deal with the subject and learn about it.